I received a copy of The Accident Season in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to Random House and Netgalley!It's the accident season, the same time every year. Bones break, skin tears, bruises bloom.The accident season has been a part of life for Cara and her family for as long as anyone can remember. Every October, they unplug the gas main, hide sharp objects and bubble-wrap the furniture. And yet still the accidents happen, until one October when Cara notices something very odd about a friend from school, Elsie, and decides to investigate.Part mystery, part ghost story, part romance, this book has elements that will appeal to a lot of people and there are aspects of this book that I absolutely loved. I thought the romantic parts were written beautifully and the concept of the accident season itself is really unique and interesting. When the final denouement comes, it was a surprise that left me reading until two in the morning but even when the explanations were finished some threads were left dangling (what was the deal with the costume shop? And Elsie’s school file?) which have kept me thinking about the book the next day.It took me a couple of chapters or so to properly get into The Accident Season; the prose is very lyrical, and dreamy, floaty prose usually isn’t my thing. Some parts left me feeling a bit like Jennifer Connolly in Labyrinth: constantly searching, but unable to get a simple, straight answer. However, I’m glad I pushed through because the plot and characterisation are superb and The Accident Season ended up being a real find.8.5/10

I received a copy of The Girl at Midnight in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to Little Brown and Netgalley. Deep below New York City live the Avicen, an ancient race of bird people with magic running through them. They don’t mix with humans (they have feathers for hair) - all except for Echo, that is. Echo was raised by the Avicen and has spent her life trying to gain acceptance in their society so when the Avicen’s enemy, the Dhakarin bring an age-old war to her doorstep then she decides to act. With the help of her foster mother, she sets out on a quest to find the firebird, an entity that legend has it will bring about the end of the war with the Dhakarin. This was an absolute whirlwind of a book. It grabbed me from the first page and didn’t let go until the explosive end. Echo was a fun protagonist; she’s not one of your ‘Oh, I’m so shy and introverted and not very attractive really’ heroes (you know the books I’m talking about). She’s not afraid to grab life by the balls and she just. Doesn’t. Let. Go. Seriously, I think she slept like once in the entire book. Some elements of this book could have gone so wrong (*coughs* bird people), but Melissa Grey’s awesome writing and worldbuilding skills were just spot on. BTW, there’s totally a love triangle forming. I don’t usually go for love triangle storylines, but I’m totally Team Caius. I found The Girl at Midnight very reminiscent of Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor (urban fantasy; two ancient races locked in a bitter war that no one wants; mortal girl who hangs out with them gets caught up in the crossfire and finds her Epic Destiny; themes of rebirth). Also, Melissa Grey’s style of writing is very cinematic and very descriptive with sassy dialogue and reminded me of Cassandra Clare’s books. Don’t get me wrong; Ms Grey definitely has her own style, but these are two authors who are similar. This was fine by me, as I really enjoyed Cassandra Clare and Laini Taylor’s books, but if you weren’t keen then you may want to download the first couple of chapters of The Girl at Midnight before buying. The Girl at Midnight doesn’t end on a cliffhanger; this is a good thing, because damn if the sequel doesn’t come out until June 2016. Can’t wait. 9.5/10

I received a copy of Tape in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to HarperCollins and Netgally. In 1993, 13-year-old Ryan is struggling with his grief over the death of his mother and is trying to deal with his father’s new marriage and his new stepmother and stepbrother. In 2003, Ameliah has just moved in with her grandmother after the death of her parents. One day when she’s clearing out the spare room, she comes across a tape and starts to listen. To her surprise, a boy starts speaking... I thought Tape was a sweet book but without being saccharine or smarmy. I kind of went into it thinking it was going to be a bit like Landline by Rainbow Rowell, but apart from one small exchange at the beginning of the book and a bit at the end, Ryan and Ameliah don’t actually communicate with each other, it’s more about the way going through the spare room junk and listening to the tapes she finds helps Ameliah to come to terms with her loss and the things going on in Ryan’s life help him with his own grief. If you’re looking for a book that has you on the edge of your seat, this probably isn’t the one for you. The love story in it is quiet and a little bit awkward (they’re only thirteen). It reminded me a little bit of the love story in The Time Traveller’s Wife: no stomach-churning love triangles or cliff-hangers, just two people who are destined to be together. The plot flows very smoothly although fairly slowly; it deals mostly with Ameliah and Ryan’s separate but intertwined stories and how they deal with their losses. There were a couple of twists, both of which I guessed from the blurb, but actually that didn’t matter because I think the rest of the plot made up for it. 7.5/10

I received a copy of Pluto in exchange for an honest review. Thanks to Random House and Netgalley. About a year ago, I helped out at a book club in my local primary school. The class teacher, a half dozen ten-year-olds and I sat around a classroom during lunch break, all of us fighting back tears, because the book we were discussing was Wonder.Pluto didn’t have me in tears like Wonder did (thankfully, because I don’t think I could have stood it) but it still had plenty of emotional resonance. It tells the story of Wonder through Chris’s eyes, August’s oldest friend. Over the course of one nightmarish day, we’re given an insight into not only Chris’s life but also his friendship with August and other kids at his school. I just loved Pluto. Chris’s perspective was so interesting and like the rest of the cast of Wonder he is flawed and heroic in equal, and totally believable, measure. August and his family feature in Pluto but they don’t take starring roles. Instead, the novella concentrates on themes of friendship and relationships in general. RJ Palacio doesn’t sugar-coat things, and I think that’s a big part of her appeal. She states quite categorically that sometimes friendships can be hard, especially with someone like August, and even though we’re told not to judge people, we still do it: it’s human nature and it’s what you do with your judgement that matters. Wonder was one of the best books I read last year and Pluto was a wonderful way to catch up with the characters I loved so much. 9/10

I was given a ARC of Mind Games in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to Hachette and Netgalley.Mind Games is set in the near future and tells the story of Luna, one of the few people who are unable to access the virtual world offered by PareCo (Woop! Woop! Evil Corporation Alert!) that the rest of the population spend their education and leisure time in. Thinking that her future will be limited to the dead-end jobs offered to those who refuse virtual life, everyone is astonished when Luna is offered a space in the PareCo tests which will give her the opportunity of an amazing future at university or even at PareCo’s Think Tanks, developing new virtual worlds. When she arrives it’s the start of a huge voyage of self-discovery. I thought Mind Games was an all-round good book, with some aspects that were just excellent. The baddies have their evil lair in a hollowed-out volcano and I don’t care which way you turn it: baddies in hollowed-out volcanoes are awesome. The characters are ace and you really end up caring about them. Luna was a super protagonist and it’s really interesting to read all the different ways her friends and family use virtual worlds. The world has been built with a lot of thought to detail. It’s very recognisable and scarily believable as a future London where people just spend all their time in virtual reality. Teri Terry hasn’t made PareCo too crazy-evil and that just makes them all the more creepy and sinister. I felt the pace of the story slowed down a bit in the middle after a nice, action-y start and the end felt a tiny bit rushed, but this wasn’t enough to put me off and I was glad it didn’t because the finale is electric with a couple of truly ‘No-o-o-o-o-o!’ moments. I was really looking forward to Mind Games, and I have to say it didn’t disappoint. Recommended for: anyone who likes techno-future dystopias and The Matrix. 8/10

I received a copy of We All Looked Up in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to Simon and Schuster UK and Netgalley.We All Looked Up is the debut novel by Tommy Wallach. It tells the story of an asteroid on a potential collision course with Earth as told from the alternating viewpoints of four high school students. The four form a karass (no, I hadn’t heard of it either): a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner. Peter is the well-rounded jock, Mr Popularity, who is starting to have an existential crisis as the book opens. Eliza has a sad home life and covers up her misery with a succession of one night stands. Andy is the skateboarding stoner with neglectful parents, coasting along his school career until the education system spits him out. Anita is the uptight overachiever with pushy parents. They’re archetypes that crop up in every high school book, and in real life too, and in some respects it kind of felt like The Breakfast Club meets The Stand. Which is obviously awesome. The four protagonists are really likeable despite their many flaws and you really end up caring about them. There are also some proper-rotten baddies for you to get your teeth into. I really liked the fact that the trajectory of Ardor is never completely certain. When it’s first spotted in the sky, it is thought that it will bypass Earth completely, but it changes course and when the big announcement comes astrologers believe there is a 66% chance of a collision and a 33% chance it will bypass completely. The Internet, electricity and phone lines all go down before the exact path of the asteroid can be communicated to the world. It was such an interesting plot point. The fact that there is a 66% chance of collision still allows people to hope - and it’s not just a fleeting hope - but people are still forced to live with total annihilation being a distinct possibility. Tommy Wallach doesn’t delve into worldwide reactions to the coming apocalypse, other than fleeting mentions of riots in various cities. He keeps the plot very local and concentrates on the reactions of the four protagonists thoroughly, as well as the reactions of a few other minor characters and concludes that people do get way existential when they’re faced with a six week wait for very-likely death, but that actually, yes, people do still think about sex and love and petty squabbles when the destruction of the human race is literally staring them in the face. He looks at the ways the members of the karass impact on each other and the way they face their destinies. I really enjoyed We All Looked Up. It didn’t leave me with that breathless got-to-skip-back-to-the-beginning-so-I-can-read-it-all-again feeling, but it definitely gave me a lot to think about. And be thankful for.

I received a copy of All Fall Down courtesy of Hachette via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. It’s been quite a while since I started and finished a book in the same day and okay, it helps that it’s half term this week, so I basically just slobbed on the sofa reading while everyone moved around me speeded-up style, but still.All Fall Down was a great book! Grace is a teenager with a troubled past. Three years ago, she saw her mother murdered by a man with a scarred face. Trouble is, everyone else keeps telling her that her mum died in a house fire. Grace knows she’s not crazy and she knows what she saw, so when she’s sent to live with her grandfather, the U.S. ambassador to Adria, and she finds the Scarred Man living in the same city, then what’s a girl to do? Why, rope all her new friends in for a huge teenage investigation, of course! Yeah, Grace is one of those protagonists who rushes in without thinking (following a man who you suspect is a trained killer through miles of underground tunnels with no torch and no one knows where you are) but actually her actions didn’t make me want to shout ‘You should be running out the door, not going upstairs to investigate a suspicious noise!’. All the way through, her motivation is to find her mother’s murderer and to prove to everyone that she isn’t crazy, so that made it slightly more believable than the random actions of characters in other books. The plot itself slows down a bit in places, but there’s still plenty of action to keep you hooked. The fact that I was reading it on my Kindle whilst stirring a saucepan of beans this evening says something. Ally Carter’s writing is great. She deals with sensitive issues like mental health, PTSD and bereavement with a light touch that keeps you reading but without downplaying their seriousness. If I could change anything about this book, I would have liked to see Grace’s relationship with Alexei developed a bit more, but I understand that this is the first book in a new series, so I guess there’s plenty of time for that further down the line. All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by All Fall Down. Definitely recommended.9/10

Stones is the debut novel by Polly Johnson. It originated on Authonomy and Harper Collins picked it up and published it back in November 2013. Stones tells the story of Coo, a teenager living in Brighton with her parents. The family is struggling to get their lives back on track after the death of Coo’s older brother, an abusive alcoholic. Coo is gradually slipping into a downward spiral, isolating herself from her parents and truanting from school, until an encounter with an alcoholic tramp, Banks, sparks up an unlikely friendship. The writing is very good and Polly Johnson obviously knows her craft. The story is set in Brighton, a city I know quite well, and her writing was so evocative that at times it was like I was actually there. I felt the subject matter was very original and was dealt with sensitively. There are a lot of YA books that deal with bereavement, but very few that feature a protagonist in a situation like Coo, with her accompanying sense of guilt and relief. Coo was an interesting character and you got a real sense of her grief mixed with guilty relief at her brother’s death. I did have a couple of issues with this book. Firstly, I felt her parents weren’t very well fleshed out. There’s a scene where Coo is reminiscing about one horrible afternoon where her brother tried to throttle her in front of their dad, but their dad just sat and did nothing to stop it. This didn’t ring true for me. No matter how much you are trying to save one of your children from a horrible disease like alcoholism, you wouldn’t stand by while they attacked your other child. No way. I also had problems with the tramps. Where I used to live, there was a tramp who’d sit on the park bench all day drinking Special Brew and shouting at people. Every morning when I passed him, he’d shout ‘Lady on a bike!’ at me (because I am a lady and I was riding a bike). I’d always shout ‘Morning!’ back at him and be on my way. Then one morning, instead of shouting ‘Lady on a bike!’ at me, Special Brew Tramp threw a rock at me. I fell off my bike and had to have five stitches in my scalp. Tramps are unstable. This is what you might call a Fact. The tramps in Stones are miles more horrible than Special Brew Tramp, but Coo keeps going back to them and hanging out with them, even after they threaten her with violence and she suspects that one of them might be behind a spate of attacks on young women in the area. She keeps trying to save Banks, even though he clearly doesn’t want to be saved. He uses her as a source of money and food and steals her mother’s ruby ring when she invites him into her house for a bath. I get that the guilt over her brother’s death is the driving factor behind her behaviour, but I just kept wanting to shake her and tell her to give it up. In the end, for me, the writing was what saved Stones and helped me to ignore the issues I had with it. I will certainly be looking out for more work by Polly Johnson in the future.

To All the Boys I've Loved Before tells the story of Lara Jean Song Covey, the middle of three sisters. Bereaved of her mother when she was just nine, her sister Margot, the sister who has always looked after her and been her surrogate mum, is now leaving for college and Lara Jean

Added to this, the love letters she wrote but never sent to all the boys she's had crushes on since middle school, letters she really only wrote for herself, to help her get over them and move on, have started popping up all over school. And when one of them falls into the hands of Peter, the boy Lara Jean fell in love with a few years ago, things start to spiral out of control.

I really enjoyed To All the Boys I've Loved Before. It had a perfect balance of screwball comedy and romance, it was lighthearted but still realistic and it left me with a really warm fuzzy feeling. The scenes where Lara Jean and Peter are pretending to be dating are like something from a Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy movie.

Lara Jean came across as a tiny bit naive, a little bit twee, a bit innocent at first, but soon it became clear that this was just her personality and a result of her upbringing and I really warmed up to her. Her family were delightful and Peter was just dreamy.

I think I read somewhere that Jenny Han has the sequel coming out this year. Note to the publishers: if P.S. I Still Love You is anything like To All the Boys I've Loved Before, send me a copy, because you are guaranteed a genuine, fangirly, squeeee review.

Woop woop! Book Club Alert! A couple of years back, a friend of mine started up a book club. She had noticed that Amazon’s algorithms - the ones where they flash up ‘because you bought books A, B and C, you might also like books X, Y and Z’ - were funneling her down such a narrow path that she was soon going to be in danger of reading the same book over and over for the rest of her life. Hence, the book club. The idea is that once a month we all read something that a huge corporation hasn’t pre-decided for us, like in some weird, literary future dystopia (hmm, good idea for a book...). So this month, someone decided on The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill. I don’t really do horror books. At all. I figure there are enough scary things in the world without being additionally terrified by the book I’m reading.The Man in the Picture is narrated by Oliver, a Cambridge alumni who returns to his old college to see a tutor of his who is elderly and in ill health. The scene is set nice and creepily on a cold January evening with the fire roaring in the hearth and Oliver’s tutor starts to tell the story of a painting he has in his possession, a Venetian carnival scene. When Oliver inspects the picture closely, he notices some out of place characters. He thinks this is odd, but as his tutor recounts the history of the painting, Oliver realises the strangest part is yet to come...The Man in the Picture was okay. Only okay. The writing was good and the plot was creepy enough to spooky me out, but not so creepy that I lost sleep. The problem I had with it was all the unanswered questions I had at the end. Who was the man illuminated in Theo’s window? If the woman in white was the jilted fiancée, then how was it she was in Venice when she was supposed to have died decades ago? Was she a ghost? Possessed by a demon? Why did the woman in white target Oliver instead of Theo? It felt like the book finished too quickly. Maybe it was the author’s intention to keep us guessing and frustrate us with unsolved clues, but it actually ended up annoying me. Susan Hill also wrote The Woman in Black, and I’d be tempted to give it a go purely based on the strength of her writing, but unfortunately the plot holes in the Man in the Picture were too much for me to ignore. 6/10

Finding Cinderella is a companion novella to Colleen Hoover’s book Hopeless and the follow-up Losing Hope. I read Hopeless a couple of years ago and loved it, so I had high hopes for Finding Cinderella. It tells the story of Six, Sky’s best friend, and Daniel, Holder’s best friend. They meet in a broom closet in school and neither knows who the other is. They end up having sex (of course) and afterwards Daniel tries to find his mystery girl but to no avail. Skip forwards a year and they meet at Sky’s house and - whaddya know - they’re instantly smitten with each other. I’m not a fan of instalove and although Colleen Hoover is a great writer and makes a really decent fist of it, Finding Cinderella is still instalove and made me go a bit squinty-eyed, like the bit at the beginning of Frozen, when Anna meets Secretly Evil Prince Hans and they dance all around the rooftops professing their deep, enduring love for the person they met five seconds ago. Although Love Is an Open Door is a top song. I digress. Despite the instalove, I’d still recommend Finding Cinderella. It’s well-written, realistic, the story arc fits neatly into the hundred-or-so pages and it left me with a nice hopeful, fluttery feeling at the end. Six and Daniel are great characters and although ninety pages isn’t really enough space to do a huge character analysis, Colleen Hoover still manages to make you care about them. 8.5/10

This is the second outstanding book I've read this week. I feel so spoilt!

Not a Drop to Drink is Mindy McGinnis's debut novel and tells the story of Lynn, a sixteen year old girl living alone on a homestead in Ohio with her mother. It is set at some point in the future where oil has all but run out and the Earth's supply of fresh drinking water has all but run out. Lynn and her mother defend the small pond on their land by shooting anyone who goes near it. I know!

Their self-contained lifestyle is turned upside down when a small group of people settle by the stream a little way away from Lynn's home. The outsiders gradually insinuate themselves with Lynn and her similarly isolated neighbour, Stebbs until their way of life is threatened by a group of men who have settled in the next town over.

Lynn develops immensely as a character over the course of the book and goes from being hardened, gun-slinging and totally isolated from human contact to developing a sense of empathy and gaining a small, loyal circle of friends. There is a romantic sub-plot, but it doesn't overwhelm the book and mostly just shows how Lynn starts to develop her humanity.

The theme is very much of survival against all odds and there's a really interesting juxtaposition between the city, which we are only told about second hand, where it seems very future dystopia, very military-controlled, people all crammed in together and reminded me slightly of Divergent, and the outer areas, where it is very much a frontier lifestyle, even down to the way people talk. They shoot now and ask questions later and it reminded my a lot of the frontier moons on Firefly.

Mindy McGinnis has dropped a few neat little hooks into the story - one of the characters, Lucy, is a natural water diviner and there are rumours that California has its own desalinisation plants - that set things up nicely for the next book which, I understand, is set a decade in the future and tells Lucy's story.

The only thing I had an issue with was such a small thing it almost seems inconsequential. *Spoiler Alert* At one point, it is alluded to that Lucy's mother had been raped by the soldiers who arrested her family. I didn't see that there was any reason for this: it did nothing to move the plot along - her subsequent grief and poor mental state could be easily justified by the murder of her husband and stillbirth of her child. Added to the fact that the men threatening Lynn's teeny little settlement are a bunch of rapist whoremongers, it came across as a bit 'All Men Are Rapists'.

Honestly, though, that was the only criticism I had. Other than that, it was an extremely well-written book with a really strong female protagonist who didn't need a man to weigh in and rescue her (yay!) and had plenty of evil meanies to hate (boo!).

Ho. Ly. Shit. This was such a good book. Let me set a bit of context for you. I not a massive sci-fi fan. I mean, I like a future dystopia or a post-apolcalypse, and I enjoyed The Reality Dysfunction and Asimov and Phillip K Dick and H.G. Wells, and I love Firefly and Serenity and Star Wars (although that’s more science fantasy) and Doctor Who and Back to the Future and Gravity and Alien... So, do you see? I like a bit of sci-fi, but not I’m not all about the hardcore sci-fi. I loved The Martian, though. Like, I loved it.The Martian tells the story of Mark Watney, an astronaut who has been stranded on Mars. I know. Nightmare. Luckily, Mark Watney is a resourceful chap and The Martian charts his desperate struggle for survival as the only human being in a barren, airless desert world with only the crap left behind from previous Mars visits to work with. The Martian is told in a mixture of first-person diary entries and third-person narrative and the contrast works really well. Mark Watney is a lively, engaging protagonist and Andy Weir manages to keep you guessing about his ultimate fate literally until the last few pages. Truly nail-biting stuff. I had about 8% of the book left to go on my Kindle and I took it to the gym with me to read while I was on the cross-trainer, so desperate was I not to put the damn thing down. About halfway through, I was enjoying The Martian so much that I decided to go onto Amazon to see what the negative reviews were saying. Not that I was being a pessimist or anything, I was just wondering what people could find that was wrong with it. The most negative reviews came from people who were saying things like, ‘Well, it’s a bit too sciency for me’. Well, duh. It’s called science fiction. And besides, it’s not really that sciency. The author does explain how the protagonist manages to fix some equipment and create water and so on, but he doesn’t exactly go into pages and pages of textbook detail. I was no fan of chemistry at school, and I was certainly no fan of physics, but I kept up just fine. I would say the science is about as tricky as The Big Bang Theory, and it’s thanks to TBBT that I know what Schrodinger’s Cat and String Theory are.The Martian was originally indie-published and I understand that Andy Weir is now the poster boy for the self-publishing movement. Well done to him. I reserve 10 out of 10 scores for truly remarkable books, and I really feel that The Martian is one of these. 10/10